Testing LXD, Canonical’s Container Hypervisor for Linux

Canonical is betting that LXD, which it calls the “pure-container hypervisor,” can beat VMware, KVM and other traditional hypervisors. To see for myself, I recently gave it a whirl. Here’s what I found.

By “pure-container hypervisor,” Canonical means it is a hypervisor that works by creating containers running on top of the host system, just like Docker. There is no hardware emulation evolved. Because LXD containers have much less overhead than traditional virtual machines, they theoretically can support many more guest operating systems than traditional hypervisors, while also delivering better performance.